You will notice on the first page that we have launched supporter memberships.

The purpose of this membership is that those that wants to are able to support shipspotting.com financially.

In return you get for example ad-free surfing of the whole shipspotting.com website, and the possibility to test out new beta functionality before it's launched in public. More will be added in time, but we try to not block any basic/current features for members and photographers out.

The generated income will be used to improve the site even further. Example: We have in late 2014 invested a lot of money in new faster and more secure servers. We would like to continue by adding more servers, load balancing and failover systems, so that the site won't be offline due to hardware or similar crashes. This will of course be of benefit of all our photographers, members and visitors, and not only those that are paying members.

In the future we might add more features to the paid membership that we have to pay for, which right now isn't possible.

Questions and support around this service should be sent through our regular contact page by chosing the subject "Supporter Membership".

Interesting....just as the supported membership is launched, I am getting noticeable increase in loud voice advertising. I don't mind the adds on the side of the screen but these are quite annoying. Coincidence? Just askin'?

I mean - first upload photo free then 1 euro (say) charge per extra photo upload of the same ship taken on the same day? Or charge a membership fee if you want to upload images bigger than say 1024x768px as one aircraft site does.

It costs a lot of money to keep this site running, employing technical experts to fix it and reduce downtime etc

Brian - Once you're logged in as a supporter member, the ads will disappear. Beta features will be shown as they are launched.

itsfoto - We do not control the ads individually ourselves. The advertising agencies we use handles this as it's thousands of advertisers rotated each month. We have removed a category with disturbing ads in various ways, but the limit on disturbing is sometimes not as hard as we'd like it. We remove those manually when found if the ad agencies are too slow. It has nothing to do with the supporter membership.

Mike - The number of photo uploads is not a problem, and no, we won't start to charge for uploading photos. The system for higher availability is not related to the amount of data, but rather the amount of equipment and software/hardware setup we have.

I've been looking into this. If you check the membership page (click the membership box on the first page). Does it say in the lower right that you are already a member? If it does, you should not see any ads, or it's definitely a bug.

Note that you have to be logged in for the membership features to work, such as no ads. If you are logged out from the site in 60 minutes - go to the log in page under FORUM -> LOGIN in the main menu. Check the checkbox for "Always stay logged in" before logging in. Be careful with this feature on public computers.

Logging out and then in again is one way of making sure everything is starting out clean.

Should this not work, please use the "Contact" in the menu and select "Supporter Membership" to contact our support and get further help.